Max’s paper entitled "Metacognitive Failure as a Feature of Those Holding Radical Beliefs" has been published in Current Biology.

Figure 4. Individual differences in radicalism are captured by a choice bias model.

We found that radical participants (as measured by scores on dogmatism and authoritarianism questionnaires) showed reduced insight into the correctness of their choices and less sensitivity to post-decision evidence, indicating a generic resistance to revising mistakes. The effect sizes were small, but robust and replicable in a second independent dataset. Given that the tasks were far removed from real-world issues we think it’s striking that basic difference in metacognition predict answers to questions indicative of radical beliefs. A blogpost unpacking these findings further can be found here.

MetaLab postdoc Dan Bang has been awarded a 4-year Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship by the Wellcome Trust to work on linking neurochemistry, confidence and social context. He plans to split his time between Harvard University (with Sam Gershman), Wake Forest University (with Ken Kishida) and UCL. Congratulations to Dan!

A paper entitled "Human Metacognition Across Domains: Insights from Individual Differences and Neuroimaging" has been published in Personality Neuroscience. Congratulations to Marion and Andy!

The article reviews recent literature on the domain-generality of human metacognition, drawing on evidence from individual differences, behavioural studies and neuroimaging. A meta-analysis of behavioural studies found perceptual metacognitive ability being correlated across different sensory modalities, but not between metacognition of perception and memory. Evidence from neuroimaging studies provided a complementary perspective on the domain-generality of metacognition, revealing co-existence of neural signatures that are common and distinct across tasks.

Figure 5. Different methodologies for quantifying brain structure and function shed light on the underpinnings of metacognition across domains.

Steve has been awarded a 2018 Philip Leverhulme Prize for Psychology from the Leverhulme Trust, together with Prof. Nichola Raihani (also at UCL), Prof. Emily Cross, Dr. Claire Haworth and Dr. Harriet Over. Leverhulme awards are granted annually in recognition of the international impact and future potential of the work. Steve plans to use the £100k award to support work in the lab developing new models of conscious awareness. Read more here!

Jason's study on how metacognition can be improved with training (and how such gains may generalise across different tasks) has been covered by Clare Wilson in the New Scientist. The paper is in press in JEP:General, and a preprint can be found here.

Dan Bang has contributed to an excellent episode of the Anthill podcast on confidence hosted by The Conversation. Among other things he discusses our recent results on the role of medial PFC in the construction of confidence.

Last weekend we pitched up at Latitude Festival as part of the BrainHub, organized together with James Kilner's group. We used this as an opportunity to get some user feedback about the latest prototype version of "MetacogMission" - an app that Andy McWilliams is developing together with London-based technology company DamnFine to study metacognition via a series of decision-making games. Thanks for everyone who took part - we got tons of useful feedback and pilot data that we are now starting to sift through.

Here's a brilliant timelapse video of the BrainHub put together by Alex Galvez-Pol in James' lab. We are also very grateful to WCHN Public Engagement coordinator Cassie Hughill who held everything together and kept everyone fed and watered, and to Ben from DamnFine for being on hand for remote tech support all the way from New York! And last but not least, Max, Matan, Xiao and Alisa who worked hard to make it a great event.

Dan Bang's paper isolating decision confidence from its component parts has recently been published in PNAS - congratulations Dan! An open access preprint can be found here, and code/data supporting the study are on our lab GitHub site.

In this paper we devised a novel psychophysical task that allowed us to independently manipulate the certainty about the perceptual input (the direction of a cloud of moving dots) and the difficulty of the decision (how close the dots were to a reference line). Both factors influenced confidence. Using fMRI, we found that some brain regions previously implicated in the encoding of decision confidence actually tracked either perceptual certainty (such as the parietal cortex) or decision difficulty (such as pre-SMA), whereas confidence was uniquely tracked in medial PFC (see image below). This may explain why prefrontal damage is regularly associated with dysfunction in metacognition (higher-level estimates of task performance), without affecting "lower level" encoding of beliefs.

This week the MetaLab teamed up with Benedetto De Martino's BdMLab for a joint retreat at the Royal Society. We were glad to have Chris Frith, Nick Shea and Howard Bowman join us as guests of honour. There were plenty of half-baked ideas (from PI's), some more fully-baked data blitzes and a surprise exchanges of books, before tapas and wine at Terroir.

Our paper "Neural mediators of changes of mind about perceptual decisions" is now out in Nature Neuroscience. This study was carried out by Steve while he was a postdoc at NYU in collaboration with Nathaniel Daw and Illy van der Putten, and used manipulations of post-decision evidence to identify differential contributions of subregions of the prefrontal cortex during changes of mind. Redmond O'Connell and Peter Murphy wrote a nice commentary on the study (from which the image below is taken from) in the same issue which can be accessed here.

Over the weekend members of the MetaLab descended on the Tate Modern to take part in the fantastic Self-Impressions event organized by the Institute of Philosophy. We used this as an opportunity to get some user feedback of a prototype of "MetacogMission" - an app we're developing together with London-based technology company DamnFine to quantify metacognition via a series of decision-making games. Thanks for everyone who came along, we got tons of useful feedback that we are now busily implementing!

Here are some photos of the day. We are very grateful to WCHN Public Engagement coordinator Cassie, to DamnFine gurus Tristam and George, and Andy McWilliams who is leading the development of MetacogMission. And of course all the lab who pitched in to help make it a great event - thank you to all!

A paper entitled "Psychiatric symptom dimensions are associated with dissociable shifts in metacognition but not task performance" has been accepted in Biological Psychiatry. Congratulations to Tricia and Marion!

Dan gave an interview to The Naked Scientists about his recent paper with Chris Frith on how to make better group decisions (published in Royal Society Open Science here). This was aired on BBC 5 Live and BBC Cambridgeshire. You can download and listen to the interview here.

Steve has been awarded a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society, to start in June 2018. The award will fund research to study the cognitive and neural structure of self-beliefs, and how these beliefs can be modified over time.